Delayed childbearing and urban revival
This paper highlights the role of delayed childbearing as an important
driver of urban revival in U.S. cities. While downtown neighborhoods provide
shorter commuting times and more consumption amenities, limited housing
space and schools’ worse quality considerably reduce the value of this location
when children are born. As households postponed parenthood, the life period in which individuals benefit the most from living downtown extended. Consequently, demand for downtown locations increased, contributing to urban revival. We first provide reduced-form evidence of the interaction between delayed childbearing and urban revival. We exploit exogenous variation in access to Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) to obtain causal estimates of the impact of delayed parenthood. The higher availability of ART increased
income downtown by 5.4% relative to the suburbs. We then estimate a spatial equilibrium model that incorporates a fertility timing decision and a within-city location choice. We calculate the counterfactual urban revival keeping the incentives to have children constant at its 1990 level. We explore the incentives coming from (i) taste for children, (ii) downtown amenities, and (iii) income child penalties. We find that the change in incentives to delay
childbearing can generate a large share of the faster income growth downtown relative to the suburbs.
Date: 23 May 2023, 16:00 (Tuesday, 5th week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Room A or https://zoom.us/j/97439169282?pwd=N2dVdGVPQmpoMUp2NnRvY2ZLNTJ1dz09
Speaker: Clara Santamaria (UC3 Madrid)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Applied Microeconomics Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Daria Ihnatenko